Joyce DiDonato & Il Pomo D'Oro

JOYCE DIDONATO & IL POMO D’ORO MY FAVOURITE THINGS 23 Aug 6pm & 8.30pm Edinburgh Academy Junior School The performance lasts approx. 1hr 10mins with no interval.

Sung with English supertitles Supported by

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JOYCE DIDONATO & IL POMO D’ORO MY FAVOURITE THINGS Joyce DiDonato Mezzo soprano Il Pomo d’Oro Zefira Valova Director/violin Rossi

Sinfonia grave à cinque voci

Monteverdi

‘Illustratevi o cieli’ from Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria

Cesti

‘Intorno all’idol mio’ from Orontea

Monteverdi

Sinfonia from L’incoronazione di Poppea

‘Addio Roma’ from

L’incoronazione di Poppea

Handel

Overture from Ariodante

Hasse

‘Morte col fiero aspetto’ from Antonio e Cleopatra

Handel ‘Piangerò

la sorte mia’ from Giulio Cesare

Rameau

Sarabande from Zoroastre

Air en rondeau from Zoroastre

Air très vif from Zoroastre

Dowland

Come again! Sweet love doth now invite

Rameau

Orage from Les Indes galantes

Handel

‘Dopo notte’ from Ariodante

PROGRAMME NOTES Joyce DiDonato’s favourite things — or at least featuring heavily among them — are Baroque opera arias from the 17th and 18th centuries, miniature emotional explorations in which time seems to stop, and characters give voice to their feelings and desires. Joy is the overriding emotion in ‘Illustratevi, o cieli’, the graceful climactic aria from Monteverdi’s 1639 Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, in which Penelope, Queen of Ithaca, finally recognises her long-lost husband Ulysses after his return from the Trojan Wars.

Pietro Antonio Cesti might be less well known to us nowadays, but his Orontea, premiered in 1656, was one of the most popular operas of its time.

In the melancholy ‘Intorno all’idol mio’, its title character, Queen of Egypt, reflects on her own emotional fragility, having fallen in love with the handsome young painter Alidoro. Banished Empress Ottavia bids a despairing farewell to her home city in the slow, intense ‘Addio Roma’ from Monteverdi’s last surviving opera L’incoronazione di Poppea. We return to Egypt with Cleopatra’s fiery ‘Morte col fiero aspetto’ from Antonio e Cleopatra

by German-born Johann Adolph Hasse, who spent much of his career in Italy, an aria that was sung at its 1725 Naples premiere by one Carlo Broschi, otherwise known as castrato Farinelli. Cleopatra remains on stage for ‘Piangerò la sorte mia’ from Handel’s 1724 Giulio Cesare, in which the Egyptian Queen laments her defeat in battle and the apparent loss of her lover Cesare, in an aria of immense dramatic intensity.

Following three instrumental numbers from Rameau’s 1749 opera Zoroastre, Dowland’s song ‘Come again! Sweet love doth now invite’, published in 1597, may not come from an opera, but lacks nothing in passion and urgency. The concert closes with the dazzling bravura of ‘Dopo notte’ from Handel’s 1735 Ariodante, set in medieval Edinburgh, in which the title character expresses his elation as he’s reunited with his beloved Ginevra, daughter of the King of Scotland.

David Kettle

JOYCE DIDONATO Kansas-born mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato is a multi-Grammy award winner and 2018 Olivier Award winner for outstanding achievement in opera. Among her recent performances are her My Favourite Things programme with Il Pomo d’Oro in Bayreuth and Valencia, a recital for the Met Stars Live in Concert series, and performances of her Songplay programme with pianist Craig Terry in Oviedo, Madrid and Barcelona. She was Carnegie Hall’s 2019/20 Perspectives Artist, and performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Riccardo Muti, and sang Schubert’s Winterreise in recital with Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The season also featured the final tour of her album In War & Peace with Il Pomo d’Oro to South America, culminating in Washington, DC, and a tour with the Orchestre Métropolitain under Nézet-Séguin.

In the opera house, her recent roles include Agrippina at the Metropolitan Opera and in a new production at the Royal Opera House; Didon (Les Troyens) at the Vienna State Opera; Sesto, Cendrillon and Adalgisa (Norma) at the Metropolitan Opera; Agrippina in concert with

Il Pomo d’Oro under Maxim Emelyanychev; Sister Helen (Dead Man Walking) at the Teatro Real Madrid and London’s Barbican Centre; Semiramide at the Bavarian State Opera and Royal Opera House; and Charlotte (Werther) at the Royal Opera House.

Much in demand on the concert and recital circuit, she has held residencies at Carnegie Hall and at London’s Barbican Centre, toured extensively in the United States, South America, Europe and Asia, and appeared as guest soloist at the Last Night of the Proms.

Among her extensive discography are Les Troyens, which won the recording (complete opera) category at the 2018 International Opera Awards, as well as Songplay, In War & Peace (which won the 2017 best recital Gramophone award), Stella di Napoli, her Grammy award-winning Diva Divo and Drama Queens, Handel’s Agrippina (which won the Gramophone opera recording and Limelight opera recording of the year awards in 2020), and her celebrated Winterreise with Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

IL POMO D’ORO Founded in 2012, the ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro is characterised by an authentic, dynamic interpretation of operas and instrumental works from the Baroque and Classical periods.

The ensemble has worked with conductors Riccardo Minasi, Maxim Emelyanychev, Stefano Montanari, George Petrou, Enrico Onofri and Francesco Corti.

Concert master Zefira Valova leads the orchestra in various projects. Since 2016 Maxim Emelyanychev has been Chief Conductor, and in 2019 Francesco Corti joined the ensemble as Principal Guest Conductor.

Il Pomo d’Oro is a regular visitor to concert halls and festivals throughout Europe. Following the international success of its programme In War & Peace with Joyce DiDonato, since 2020 it has been performing her new programme My Favourite Things.

The ensemble’s extensive discography includes several opera recordings: Handel’s Agrippina, Serse, Tamerlano, Partenope and Ottone, Leonardo Vinci’s Catone in Utica and Alessandro Stradella’s La Doriclea. Among its instrumental recordings

are Haydn’s violin and harpsichord concertos, as well as a cello album with Edgar Moreau that received Echo Klassik awards in 2016. In 2019, the albums Anima Sacra with countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński, and Voglio Cantar with soprano Emöke Baráth, both received the prestigious Opus Klassik award, and the disc of Handel’s Serse was awarded the Abbiato del Disco in Italy. In 2018, the ensemble’s recording of Stradella’s La Doriclea won the Deutschen Schallplattenkritik prize. Virtuosissimo with violinist Dmitry Sinkovsky, released in 2019, received a Diapason d’Or. The name of the ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro is derived from the title of a 1668 opera by Antonio Cesti, possibly one of the largest, most extravagant and most spectacular opera productions in the history of the genre.

ZEFIRA VALOVA Bulgarian violinist Zefira Valova is a leading specialist in early music, who performs as a soloist, leader, concertmaster and chamber musician, and also champions early music repertoire in her home country.

She has led Il Pomo d’Oro in concerts with countertenors Franco Fagioli and Jakub Józef Orliński, cellist Edgar Moreau, and mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg. In 2021 she tours Europe with the programme My Favourite Things with mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato.

Among her recent CD releases are two albums as conductor in arias by Vinci and Handel with Franco Fagioli, and Bach concertos with Shunsuke Sato. Later this year she releases a new album of violin concertos from the late 18th century with Il Pomo d’Oro. She is a guest concertmaster of the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra with musical director Aapo Häkkinen, with a main focus on Romantic repertoire.

She has been concertmaster of the European Union Baroque Orchestra, where she worked with Lars

Ulrik Mortensen, Ton Koopman and Enrico Onofri, among others. She has performed and recorded music by Vivaldi and Telemann as a soloist and concertmaster with Les Ambassadeurs, directed

by Alexis Kossenko.

In 2020 she won first prize in the José Herrando Baroque Violin Competition. Valova is the founder of the Sofia Baroque Arts Festival, and in 2017 she received the Musician of the Year prize for artistic activity by Bulgarian National Radio, as well as the Golden Feather award for culture in 2021. She led the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra in programmes of 18th-century concertos between 2016 and 2019.

She graduated at Sofia’s National Academy of Music with Yosif Radionov, and with Lucy van Dael at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam.

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